Biography
Laura Thipphawong is a Toronto-based contemporary artist, writer, and historian. She has exhibited art and presented her research internationally in commercial and non-profit galleries and various academic forums. Her surreal and narrative style of highly detailed and imaginative compositions is inspired by folklore, literature, history, science, and psychoanalysis. These various elements are pieced together to create dream-like images and hallucinatory tableaus that symbolically reflect Laura’s interpretation of emotions and experiences.
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As a self-taught artist, Laura made her way from a small town in northern Ontario to Toronto to pursue a career in the arts. She now holds a medal and a Bachelor of Arts in Visual and Critical studies from OCAD University and a Master of Arts in Art History from the University of Toronto.
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Laura’s work has been featured in several galleries, exhibition spaces, and publications such as CBC Arts, New Visionary Magazine, the Lieutenant Governor’s Suite in Toronto, and the National Gallery of Canada. She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Secret Door, an online publication for critical arts writing.
Artist Statement
My work in narrative magical realism drawing and painting explores meaning, often focusing on existentialism, concepts of perception, and relationships between the self and the other. I illustrate these themes by treating my compositions as a chance to tell symbolic stories that reflect my emotional and situational experiences. My process involves researching or ruminating over specific visual motifs and then constructing them into narrative or emblematic compositions.
The symbolic representation of emotional experience in my work often means reconciling oppositional materials and evoking feelings of unsettlement and inner conflict. The constant theme is the ambiguity of disruption. I believe that personal evolution and emotional ambiguity are the truest aspects of humanity, however terrifying, and that the psyche remains the most fascinating artistic subject. While we are comfortable to separate our personal reality from that which threatens us, no one is a spectator of humanity, and no one is absolved of it. For this reason, I am intent on searching the areas that hinge between the false dichotomies of good and evil, predator and prey, and beauty and the grotesque.
More About My Process
I start my painting process by ruminating on the images and ideas that linger in my head, and then work to compose those images into something that feels representative of how I experience those images—this part of the process is instinctive and requires focus on creativity and imagination. When my intuitive compositions are ready, I start to self-analyze, scrutinizing what it was that made these images important or intriguing enough for me to want to paint them. This phase involves a lot of psychological probing and honesty. Once I understand my images and my rationale behind creating them, I impart my knowledge of intersectional art history and media to add in or augment aspects to the image on an intellectual level. Then I get to work painting. The content of my images is always evolving, but there are some clear throughlines in my work as a whole. The exploration of connectedness and integration of seemingly oppositional sides is a consistent element in my work. I am fascinated by the intrinsic appeal of the abject and uncanny, or the grotesque in images, and of the symbolism in art that stems from psychology and social history. I love images of monsters, nature, mischievous animals, luxurious food, ghostly figures, women with a sexually suggestive disposition, and dark chasms leading to the unknown. I am particularly interested ideas about the complex and ambiguous relationship between the self and the Other in all its forms.